sun moved round the earth, contains not so really care about, and feel his comfort affected much the germ of almost all our subsequent by, matters which lie far off from him, and controversies as one possible result of them, may never happen at all. He is none the which some minds have already reached, less effective for a tendency to exaggeration; while others are on the high road to it. Dr. and, above all, he must have strong, and may Newman was a marvellously persuasive and have utterly unreasonable, likes and dislikes. sympathetic precursor. To a smaller audi- Rousseau was far more of a precursor than ence, and perhaps in a narrower way, Dr. Voltaire, and he derived his powers from Arnold was even more persuasive; but these sources which it is easier to understand than names, and those of all other English pre- to respect. The stern, manly habit of mind cursors, grow pale before the two great names which leads a man to make the best of what which stand, as it were, on opposite sides of cannot be helped, to dream few dreams, and the passage from the eighteenth to the nine- to reckon on nothing unusual-the temper teenth century-Coleridge and Bentham. which deliberately says, with Dr. Johnson, Mr. Mill has well said that the whole history"Sir, this is a world in which there is much of the present generation has flowed from the ideas of which they were the representatives, and that any one who could rise to the point from which their respective creeds would appear as opposite sides of one larger faith would have practically solved some of the greatest problems of the age. to be done and little to be known "—is very unfit for a precursor. Yet this is the temper which enables a man to govern the world when it is well governed. It is one of the most striking of the many difficulties and contradictions presented by human life, that the best and wisest men often appear to know less than fools. It is out of the mouth of babes and sucklings that the approach of great changes is most frequently announced. It is by the assistance of weak and credulous people that they are effected. It does not follow that a man approves of the changes of which he is the herald. On the contrary, as often as not, he views them with dread, and, if he saw them actually accomplished, would feel the most eager indignation against them. It was his keen perception of the tendencies of the age, and his bitter hatred of them, that drove Dr. Newman to Rome. It is curious to speculate on the feelings with which Voltaire would have regarded the Revolution which he did so much to bring about. He was, for all practical purposes, a Tory of the Tories. Nothing would have pleased him better than an absolute king surrounded by institutions full of historical curiosities, and prompted by philosophers to perform judicious experiments on a grateful people. It is difficult to realize the disgust with which he would have regarded the history of a great part of the last It should be observed that the qualities which make a man a precursor are by no means the most admirable in the world, nor are they the most highly paid. They consist, apparently, in great sympathy, great force of imagination, and that power in judging of the general course of events which, if displayed in small private affairs, would be tact. The possession of all these gifts is perfectly consistent with a total absence of those powers which, if we could choose, most men would wish to possess. For instance, that calm, large, masculine understanding which can grasp a great subject, seize upon its material points, mould it into shape, and draw the inferences which the necessity of the case requires the royal gift which, in the transaction of all the affairs of life, is beyond all price is by no means essential to the character of a precursor, and is not found more often in connection with that than with other characters. Of the eminent men mentioned above, Bentham was the only one who can be said to have possessed it; and the most remarkable feature in Bentham's mind was the union of the two powers-the minute, law-seventy years. yer-like sagacity which can clear up confu- The most interesting question which these sion, and the grasp which can not only see, considerations suggest is, whether there are but influence, the tendencies of a generation. at present any precursors, and what it is that As a general rule, it would seem that, in they forebode? What are the subjects which order to be a true precursor, a man must have in the next generation will come up for discussome of the feminine elements of character in sion? The question is at present very harmHe must be excitable. He must | less, if it is not very interesting. Our pres excess. ent state of mind was well expressed the liberty which at present exists. That neiother day by one of those admirable weekly ther party will get the extreme result at cartoons with which we are supplied by which they aim, may be predicted with great Punch. Most of our readers know, better confidence; but it is also clear that their than we can tell them, how the International controversy, end how it will—especially if it Derby was won by the good horse British ends in the modified victory of the party of Constitution, ridden by that rather heavy movement, as such controversies usually do— weight National Debt, and how France, Aus- can hardly excite any great popular feeling. tria, Prussia, Rome, and the United and Con- It must go off into a question of criticism, federate States were so completely beaten as verbal, historical, and scientific, which cannot to be worth placing. Universal congrat- not be condensed into any such short popular ulation and a general chuckle and hand-shak- issue as is required in order to make a coning are very pleasant, and, if they could last siderable stir in the world. The nation at indefinitely, would leave little or nothing to large will never interest itself passionately in be desired. That they should so last is not an inquiry whether the fact that the last to be expected, unless, indeed, the world has chapter of Deuteronomy was not written by not only changed its mind, but got a new Moses proves or not that Moses was not the constitution to live under-a theory which author of the bulk of the Pentateuch. does not seem very probable. It is, however, a singular question where we shall next break out-whence will come the storm which is at present hushed in a repose which, according to all rules, ought to be described as grim. From the nature of the English people, it may be inferred with confidence that it will be either religious or political, or both. Some persons may suppose-and there are many symptoms which at first sight might favor the suggestion-that we are on the brink of a great religious controversy. It may be true-it probably is true-that such a controversy will occur, and that it has already begun; but there is every reason to believe that, whatever may be the importance of the results ultimately produced, the controversy itself will be quiet to the last degree. If the liberal party in the Church of England carried their point to the very utmost, they would produce nothing but general liberty of speculation. They would convert the Church of England into an endowed profession, with formularies, but without a creed, and they would secure the right of the clergy to controvert on the Monday doctrines implied by the prayers which, in the discharge of their official duty, they read in church on the Sunday. If, on the other hand, they are utterly defeated or driven out of the Church, the only result will be the restriction of the In the event of the coming struggle, whenever it comes, being a political one, there are not wanting some signs of the direction which it is likely to take. There are indications that the old Socialist doctrines which have played so vigorous a part in France, and which were supposed to have been very effectually laid in what can scarcely be called a metaphorical Red Sea, have changed their skin, and are making considerable progress in certain classes of the population, and under more reasonable forms than they have hitherto worn. Take a mixture of physical science and philanthropic sentiment instead of a religion-associate people in Trades' Unions and Co-operative Stores-adopt Comte's moral and social doctrines, purified from the grotesque absurdities which he chose to affix to them in his later years—and you may make up as respectable an image to bow down to as is usually worshipped by a popular party. Signs that such a process is going on are not wanting. They may come to anything or nothing. At present, they are certainly sufficiently well marked to justify a transient curiosity; but, should they ultimately prove large enough to shelter all the fowls of heaven, they would not make so much difference in the end as one would at first be inclined to suppose. In the meantime, let us cultivate our cabbages. From The Athenæum. History of England during the Reign of George the Third. By John George Phillimore. Vol. I. (Virtue Brothers & Co). THE first of the British-born Georges is likely to have justice rendered him at last. If he have not, it will not be for want of inquiry or for lack of sifting evidence. The testimony is conflicting enough, because of its abundance and because the witnesses are many, and a little more like advocates than witnesses. Nevertheless, we shall be able to pronounce a true verdict at last, the bearing of which undoubtedly will be that George the Third was neither so peerless as "the king's friends" would have him to be, nor quite such an ogre as he was painted by his adversaries. It is strange that we should be so ignorant of late events, and of the actors in them. The fact is, that our sires and grandsires knew nothing of contemporary history except its gossip, and we ourselves, perhaps, think chiefly of George the Third as the good old man with a sempiternal smile and a large cockade, a dozen and more children, and a wife whose sole personal beauty was in her arms. Under our new lights, this homely George begins to come before us in heroic dimensions, for good or for evil, as interesting as the conqueror himself. That we require such revelations of the recent past should be a profitable lesson to us in the actual present. Young people should learn the contemporary history in which they live and of which they are a part. Vicksburg is as important as Saguntum; to follow Forey from the coast to Puebla (and learn why he went) is as exciting as accompanying Cortez; and to know something of the history and the sayings and the doings of those who govern and of those who would like to govern us, is, at least, as important for our youth of either sex as to learn the constitution of the Roman legislature. We have heard objections made to this on the ground that such instruction would lead to partisanship. Why, so it ought, if by partisanship be meant that a young fellow should be able to entertain an opinion of his own, and have spirit to support it. It would breed dissensions among boys, we hear some one say. We hope it would, if by that we are to understand discussions and an obstinate sticking to an opinion till it can be logically reversed. Partisanship! Dissensions! Do they not exist among the young students of ancient history? We can say, for our own parts, that we have seen furious fights between the respective supporters of Hector and Achilles, and have ourselves bled for the beautiful Helen, of whose cause we have since become ashamed. We rejoice, therefore, at the development which is being given to modern, that is, to recent history, with the details of which our ancestors of two removes little troubled themselves, or learnt it so blunderingly as to rob it of all charm. The truth is, that the History of England during the reign of George the Third looks, in the books and papers of that period, as heavy as the portrait of that monarch himself, dull as his smile and pert as his cockade. Yet what a reign it was for the rise and the ruin of empires, for bloody battles, for marvellous duellos on the sea, for dazzling oratory, for sweeping changes over the face of the world, for glory, corruption and calamity, in all of which our country had a part, and sometimes a suffering and humiliating part! We all know this much. What we want further to know is,-why there came this much; how the results were obtained; and what were the hidden springs by which these great effects were arrived at. Mr. Phillimore is the new witness who comes to dispel obscurity on many of these points, and who modestly says that he will be content if he be found like the torch-bearer who does not so much enlighten himself as the path of those who follow him. Mr. Phillimore, it must be understood, does not write his history with rose-water. To stern views he gives strong language. He is a Royalist, and he abhors a king who is not, in his turn, a Royalist too, and a loyalist to boot. He would be ashamed to paint George the Third in any other colors than those which represent him as coarse, illiberal, and the word must be said, though Mr. Phillimore employs many dainty phrases to express the same terrible thing—a liar! shall have to look upon George the Third's children as a rude, graceless, ill-nurtured set of boys and girls; and on George the Third's mother as something which cannot be expressed in plain phrase, but which Mr. Phillimore expresses by asking, "Would any court-chaplain venture to say that his mother was spotless?" After this query, it is need We less to say that the Princess-Dowager of the Third, are admirable for the lucidity in Wales and Lord Bute are constantly together which they place a vast amount of facts, all in unseemly propinquity, and that, indeed, of which they preserved by rare skill in the whole Georgian family is seen under very condensation. unpleasant aspects. This skill, indeed, is manifest in all parts of the book, and as one sample of it, we give Mr. Phillimore's character-portrait of George the Third himself; if "the wen and the wrinkles" be there, the good points are put “i' the sun "' also: 66 Mr. Phillimore has not undertaken a disagreeable task without very excellent reasons, and for this smashing of the old idols at St. James's, Carlton House, Buckingham Palace, Windsor, and Kew, he pleads his justification | in these words :-"Yielding to no one in loyal and dutiful attachment to her majesty, -an attachment founded, not upon the servile notions which her family was placed upon the throne of England expressly to destroy, but on the solid ground of gratitude for the happiness which my country has enjoyed under her mild and constitutional rule, -I have not hesitated to point out the crimes-parties were to be broken up-the great and errors of her kindred." "The object of George the Third was to make his will as absolute in England as that of any German prince was over the_boors and servile nobles in his dominions. Everything was to be drawn to his personal favor and inclination: ministers were not to look Commons to the people-every tie of social to the House of Commons, nor the House of affection and public trust was to be dissolved families were to be stripped, not only of the We confess that it seems at first sight influence derived from the abilities and virstrange that because a lady is supposed to tues of their representatives, but of that have secured to you a certain amount of hap free country. Nothing was to stand bewhich property must always command in a piness, you are therefore to expose her wicked old grandfather, and assure all the world of Rockinghams, Grenvilles, Bedfords, Saviles, tween the crown and the populace. The the worthlessness of her whole kith and kin. were to be reduced, so far as political auWould Mr. Phillimore have refrained from thority was concerned, to the condition to pillorying this family, unclean in his eyes, which the nobles of Castile had been brought if their successor had inherited only their by Ximenes, and the French aristocracy by vices? Mr. Phillimore, despite some exag- The smile and favor of the sovereign were in the third monarch of the house of Bourbon. gerated and some unquestionably mistaken views, has rendered excellent service to his- to which an English gentleman, however anthe eighteenth century to be the sole object tory; but we think he should have left her cient his lineage, however great his possesmajesty's name out of the matter altogether. sions, however splendid his abilities, however He had better grounds to go upon than those numerous his titles to the love and veneration he assigns. It is not because he sits com- of his countrymen, should aspire. They were fortably under the olive-tree with the lady, with them Bute, or Sandwich, or Barrington to stand in lieu of all other qualifications: that he can find just reasons for abusing her kinsman who cut down the oak. Even in the omnipotent; without them Pitt, Grenville, -a minion, a knave, a parasite-were to be French proverb we are told that if you dine Rockingham, Savile-probity, knowledge, with a man whose father was hanged, you station, genius-were to be ciphers. The will do well not to make so much as an al-king was to interfere directly and personally lusion to a rope. in all the affairs of government, from the But, to come more immediately to the vol- highest to the lowest and most minute deume before us, let us state that all the pre-minister to the appointment of an architect. tail of office-from the choice of a prime liminary pages tend to show that if George Even Louis the Fourteenth, in the height of the Third was but an indifferent king, he his power, had been kept somewhat in check succeeded to a worse than indifferent system, by the dread of public opinion, and of the with which he did his best, according to his nature and his training. The preliminary chapters, and those devoted to the history of Ireland and of India, although they travel a little beyond the limits in which an historian might keep himself who professes to write an account of the reign of George sneers of a keen-eyed and sarcastic race; but in England, where duller men, rolling without respite in the mire of practical life, looked only to what they could see, and were hardened against wit and opinion, and touch, and count,-to the letter of the law, and the distribution of wealth and power,the sovereign, if he could once emancipate himself from the control of the aristocracy of temperance was to the last hour of his -I use the word in its widest sense-if he rational life a public blessing. Though, could succeed in reconciliating the ends of treading in the steps of his race, he was an arbitrary power to the forms of a free con- unkind father, he was a faithful husband. stitution, had no such restraint to appre- The English pardoned much when they saw hend. He would have no more to fear from the virtues they most appreciate on the gibes and epigrams than Amurath or Au- throne.' rungzebe. But let me not be unjust. If George the Third had quite succeeded in this In the portrait of George the Third's object, England would have had no reason to mother, on the contrary, there is little of dread a repetition of the injuries she bore pleasant light at all; the whole figure is in under the Tudors, and did not bear under sombre shade. She is described as "a corthe Stuarts: men's lives and properties, the rupted and dissembling woman, bent on honor of their wives and daughters, so far as the monarch was concerned, would have been safe. He would have been able at the end of his reign, like the Jewish prophet, to have called on those whom he had ruled to witness whose ox or whose ass he had taken, power and greedy of money," and a mother who combined with her son's tutors to exasperate the defects in that son's character: or whom he had defrauded-and he would been early and carefully taught the lesson "It is evident that George the Third had have obeyed the law. He would neither have exacted a hundred pullets from a great art, and which at one time was on the point which had proved fatal to the house of Stulady, as the price of an interview with her of being destructive to himself. Lord Harhusband, like King John; nor have flung court, his governor, a courtier, but not withmembers of Parliament into prison for their out a sense of honor, resigned rather than votes and speeches, like Charles the First; witness what he found himself unable to nor have murdered them by bills of attainder, like Henry the Eighth. George the Third prevent.'. When Lord Harcourt was asked would not have imitated the debauchery of by the minister to assign the cause of his resignation, he replied that the reason was Augustus of Saxony, nor have allowed a courtezan to choose his ministers and gen- himself,' clearly pointing out the mother as 'too delicate to mention to any but the king erals, like Louis the Fifteenth; nor would the cause of the evil that he complained of. he have run about the streets of his capital That mother, the princess dowager, was, in beating respectable women with his cane, the opinion of all, high and low, of the best like the father of Frederick the Great. The earnings of the laborer and the tradesman the populace, before and after her husband's informed contemporary writers, as well as of would not have been squandered on harlots death, the mistress of Lord Bute. To him and men as infamous as harlots, but (and in she sacrificed, if some writers are to be beno very lavish measure) on parasites, hypocrites, and dunces. He would have contented lieved, at least one rival. To him she cerhimself with exacting strict and absolute sub-tainly sacrificed her reputation, and, what mission to his wishes in Church and State. she valued more, her wealth. In order to He would have been satisfied if he could strengthen her ascendency over her eldest have excluded every glimmering of light from the moral horizon of England; if he could have guarded himself against the danger of admitting to his councils any man of greater abilities than his own; if he could have disposed of every place of importance in the kingdom to a series of beings like Lord Bute and Lord Sidmouth, and have brought this island to be the Goshen of lords of the bed-chamber and maids of honor son, whom she despised, she excluded him as much as possible from all society, while she carefully instilled into his mind the arbitrary notions which were exemplified in the petty courts of Germany, and which her paramour. These were the seeds sown, were in speculation the cherished maxims of which fell on a most congenial soil, and soon sprang up into a bitter harvest.” Darker still is a family group, with a whole House of Lords in the gloomy background : —a flat, monotonous level of Germam servitude and repose. If he suffocated all political speculation, he would have promoted agricul- "George the Second, from wise and benevture. If to inquire into the nature and des-olent motives, had been anxious to see his tiny of the soul would have been perilous, in-heir married before his death, and with that vestigations into irrational matter, into acids view had proposed the hand of a Princess of and alkilis, and the habits of molluscæ, topics Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel, a beautiful and in no way likely to cherish any love of in- highly-accomplished lady, to his grandson.. dependence, would have been secure, and The princess dowager, however, true to her perhaps encouraged. The example he gave system, and determined that her son should |